Wednesday, April 28, 2010

"The BSC's first release since 2003's Good on Grob Records is now available in FLAC, Apple Lossless, MP3, and OGG formats. The cost is one Tweet (more on that, later).

23% Bicycle and/or Ribbons of the Natural Order captures the BSC shortly after an intense series of performances at the Phoneme Festival, a three-night event in Philadelphia featuring members of the band in a series of small groups followed by full BSC sets each evening. In one sense, the music is tight and controlled, maintaining a sustained tension as events peel from one to the next, not so much moving forward as revealing increasingly buried layers. But, from the very first sound, it is clear that everything teeters on chaos. The familiarity between the musicians is apparent, as is their willingness to undermine that familiarity, to send each other to unlit corners and map whatever sublime beauty or horror is found there. To say that the resulting music is dark is to miss its jubilance. It is complex and visceral, the work of an ensemble committed to both its refinement and unravelling.

As mentioned above, this is a free download, provided you Tweet about it. You'll just need to follow the download link below, which will bring up a default Tweet (you can change it). Twitter will ask if it's okay for this application to access your account (We're not harvesting info, just confirming your Tweet. None of your data is saved to our server). If you agree, you'll be taken to the download page. And if you don't have a Twitter account, it is ridiculously fast and easy to sign up (and equally simple to cancel your account). You can do it during the download process.

The BSC was formed in 2000 and has remained an integral part of Boston's improvised music scene. Good, their release with Axel Doerner and Andrea Neumann, still remains a touchstone of modern large group improvisation. In addition to improvisations, they have performed a number of contemporary compositions, including Christian Wolff's Edges, which they recorded with the composer for Mode Records."